Jackets fall to Wild

Just a warning Jackets fans this is going to be a very negative post.

The Blue Jackets will not win the Traverse City Prospect Tournament this year, now before you call for my head on a hockey stick hear me out. The Blue Jackets are the only team that brought a team of actual prospects, I say this because during the second intermission me and my Dad starting looking at the Wild's roster and where it said what league the player played in last season we saw NHL not once not twice but a whopping three times. That got us looking through the rest of the tournament's rosters, now the Wild is the only team we did the actual math for the Wild brought a team that played a combined 280 NHL,AHL or ECHL games last season. The Blue Jackets total in those leagues 4, 3 of those by today's starting goaltender Riley Gill with the ECHL's Kalamazoo Wings. Now I can't think of a good defintion of a player that qualifies them as a prospect but playing in a professional league has to change that status a little. Sorry for my ranting on to the actual game recap.

For the second game in a row the Jackets got off to a fast start scoring within the first two minutes with Oliver Gabriel scoring off a Chris Francis shot to take a 1-0 lead. After the Wild tied it at 1-1 a few minutes later is when the rough stuff started, the referees called 7 penalties for either fighting or coincidental minors for roughing. Now the NHL must be using this tournament to try a new officiating system, the system will use 24 referees 20 were wearing red shirts that looked a lot like Minnesota Wild jerseys and 4 wearing the normal black and white striped shirt. The system appeared to work ok because everytime the refs in red shirts yelled out a penalty the refs in black would call it leading to the Wild having 6 power plays. Columbus's power play went 0 for 8 including at least a minute of 5 on 3(i forget how long sorry). I'm not putting all the blame on goalie Riley Gill, Gill stood on his head a few times and made some spectacular saves when the game was already out of reach.

This is a hard game to tell you who impressed me because you really only noticed the guys throwing there weight around. Dalton Prout and Michael Kantor continued to impress, but it wasnt for the passes like I commented about Kantor yesterday it was for his fists. But theres a negative Kantor was called for 3 minors and a 5 minute major for fighting. Prout was solid again in the losing effort, Petr Straka was the only non tough guy to impress in his tournament debut picking up an assist. Tomorrow is a practice only day with the tournament picking up on Wednesday with the Jackets(0-2) playing Carolina(1-1) at 6:30